The End of Public Education?

In: Telos, Heft 111, S. 123-138

Abstract

Considers the current crisis in education as epiphenomenal of wider social dynamics related to the logic of modernization & rationalization. It is suggested that the present educational system is not natural, but the result of a 100 year process of state centralization & modernization that marginalized communities & informal structures while privileging the state & the economy. Further, it has ceased to produce independent, reasoning citizens but instead serves primarily a policing function. Thus, state-sponsored education has undermined the very social conditions it was initially intended to serve. The crisis of higher education is taken to be one manifestation of this broader trend. To stem this crisis it is deemed necessary to radically rethink the character of state-sponsored public education so as to open space for the reintegration of local communities into the educational process. D. Ryfe